Dark Reading: Back To Basics: 10 Security Best Practices

The most effective strategy for keeping organizations, users and customers safe is to focus on the fundamentals.

9/4/2015
By Nimmy Reichenberg

"We need the latest security technology in order to protect our network against sophisticated attacks."

That’s a quote I’ve heard all too often, but those shiny new toys are not always the best use of your money – or your security staff’s time.

Despite the media hype, the biggest threats to your enterprise data assets are actually from the same old threats that we were worried about last year, five years ago, and in many cases even a decade ago. Only a handful of attacks truly use sophisticated “Mission Impossible” techniques, so the shiny new tools may do more harm than good at protecting your organization.

First, precious IT time is needed to learn, deploy, and adapt these new tools to your environment – time that could be better spent maximizing the benefits of your existing tools. Second, these new tools will likely overload staff with even more alerts and anomalies, and your already overwhelmed staff may not have the skills or the time to analyze, prioritize, and address them.

So before investing in new tools, here are 10 security best practices to help protect your organization with the techniques and technologies you likely already have in place. These best practices should be common knowledge, but unfortunately they are hardly common practice.

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